Neil Young looks forward to a silent screen legend making a fresh splash at this year’s London Film Festival

“PICTURES were made for him – the theatre was too little.” That’s one legend of cinema – Allan Dwan, generally ranked the most prolific director of all time – talking about another: Douglas Fairbanks, the first and greatest “King of Hollywood”, with whom he worked on 11 movies, including what might well be the hidden gem of this year’s London Film Festival line-up, A Modern Musketeer from 1917.

Dwan, who amassed more than 400 credits in a unique career spanning six decades, recalled the movie in his characteristic pithy, straight-arrow style: “We made up a story of an imaginative young fellow who’s very restless in his Kansas hometown. To show how restless he was, we had him run through the town and onto the church and up the steeple. Well, finally, he rides out in a little yellow Model T Ford – that’s his steed – and he gets into a series of adventures we invented as we went along. And it was a comedy, with plenty of melodrama. We had our heavy and we had to throw him off a cliff. Whenever I see a cliff, I’ve got to throw someone off it.”

Fairbanks delighted in such high-jinks. His bounding physicality and genial all-American persona made him arguably the most famous person in the world – certainly by a very long chalk the most popular movie-star – during his prime. It’s a scandal that his movies are now so seldom screened. Indeed, many British cinemagoers may be more familiar with his son, Douglas Fairbanks Junior, a rather more urbane and conventional performer.

But Fairbanks Senior, who formed United Artists with his wife, Mary Pickford, and a chap from Walworth called Charlie Chaplin, was a genuine one-off without whom, it’s possible to argue, Hollywood as we now know it might never have developed. In 1922, the industry was in desperately dire straits before Dwan’s spectacular Robin Hood, – which Fairbanks funded out of his own pocket – single-handedly reinvigorated the public appetite for “moving pictures”.

Eight decades on, cinema appears to be in dizzyingly rude health – at least if the sheer number of tantalising titles at this year’s LFF is anything to go by. But while the likes of Quantum of Solace, the new James Bond extravaganza, Steven Soderbergh’s Che and Ron Howard’s Frost/Nixon will attract the headlines, the more discerning viewer may find the blazing, bounding charisma of Doug Fairbanks even more rewarding.

A Modern Musketeer is showing at the National Film Theatre on London’s South Bank on Tuesday Oct 28 at 6pm in a double-bill with Fred Guiol’s 1928 short Pass the Gravy (which LFF publicity trumpets as “one of the funniest silent comedies ever made.”). The cherry on the cake is that the superb pianist Neil Brand, one of the world’s most eminent “interpreters” of silent cinema, will be the accompanist for both films.

Also recommended: Dry Summer (the newly-restored Turkish classic from 1964); Good Cats (the third film from Ying Liang, China’s most exciting young director); Liverpool, the (latest gnomic dispatch from Argentine “poet of cinema”, Lisandro Alonso); Of Time and the City (the return of Terence Davies with a sublimely sardonic love-letter to his Merseyside hometown); RR (long-standing LFF favourite James Benning’s austere paean to the railroads).